An ethicist, Dr. Julie Ponesse has warned that organizations that impose COVID-19 mandates must also be responsible for the harm those mandates could potentially cause and cannot be absolved by claiming they were following orders.
Ponesse was fired from Ontario’s Huron University College in September after refusing to comply with its mandatory COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Ponesse was suspended from the college, which is affiliated with Western University, after a video in which she described the ethical dilemma she faced in refusing her employer’s vaccine mandate went viral on the internet.
She told The Epoch Times that she found the decision “very problematic” because the university did not do its due diligence to explore whether the public health mandate is ethically justified.
Ponesse said the issue raises questions about what rights and responsibilities organizations have when following orders from federal authorities.
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“I don’t think the university gets to say, ‘Well, we’re imposing it just because Health Canada says we should,’ because if that mandate ends up causing harm, then the university is complicit in that harm,” she said.
“They’re partly responsible for that harm, and they can’t completely absolve themselves of responsibility—moral or legal responsibility—just by claiming that they were following the orders of Health Canada or the government.”
The professor, who had taught ethics in the philosophy department for 20 years, was terminated from her teaching position roughly a week after her suspension. Ponesse said the termination letter stated her refusal to comply with the school’s vaccine mandate as one of the reasons for her dismissal.
“I just don’t believe that the circumstances we had in Canada at the time warranted that kind of incursion into a person’s private medical information,” she said of the mandate.
According to Ponesse, Western University first rejected mandating COVID-19 vaccination for its staff but reversed course in August to require masking, social distancing, and proof of vaccination. The university also removed the testing option in lieu of providing vaccination proof around the time her video was published.
Ponesse’s video was made in cooperation with the advocacy group Canadian Covid Care Alliance, a coalition of scientists, doctors, and health-care professionals who aim to provide “balanced evidence-based information to the Canadian public about COVID-19.”
“I think we need to change the culture. We need to open up in people’s minds that there’s another way to look at this before we’re going to see judges … being brave enough even just to hear expert testimony and to look at the evidence.”